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Spring 2004

Features

Mount St. Helens: The perfect laboratory :: It is impossible to accept the immensity of Mount St. Helens and the effect of its catastrophic 1980 eruption unless you are able to stand beneath the enormous crater on the pumice plain and listen to John Bishop talk about lupines.

{ WEB EXCLUSIVE–Gallery:Mount St. Helens :: Photographs of John Bishop's research and the volcano. By Robert Hubner}

Lonely, Beautiful, and Threatened—Willapa Bay :: Willapa Bay is the largest estuary between San Francisco and Puget Sound. It boasts one of the least-spoiled environments and the healthiest salmon runs south of Canada. It produces one in every four oysters farmed in the United States and is a favorite stop for tens of thousands of migratory birds. And it's in trouble.

Extreme Diversity—in Soap Lake :: Soap Lake is surrounded by dark shores, sheer rock walls, a primeval landscape. Its waters have long been thought by some to cure certain maladies. It is also home to strange, hardy organisms that live nowhere else.

Keith Lincoln, Barn Builder :: Over 25 years at Washington State University, alumni director Keith Lincoln built many things, including friendships and a place where alums can go to sit in the shade.

High-stakes tests—what do they tell us?

The current enthusiasm for contemporary American school
criticism and reform can be traced to the 1983 federally sponsored
report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational
Reform. Its most infamous line states, "If an unfriendly
foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre
instructional performance that exists today, we might well have
viewed it as an act of war."

Such political rhetoric is, of course, nonsense, as we will show
with international and national data.

What is not being reported?

Media reports tend to show that school children in the United
States are behind their peers in other countries. Yet in 1992, the
data for eighth-grade math performance show the world's "top 20"
included 12 U.S. states. In 1998, 13-year-old science students in
14 states ranked in the top 15 worldwide. Washington State was not
included in the 1992 or 1998 studies. However, Washington was in a
1999 study showing that only six nations beat Iowa and Nebraska in
eighth-grade math. In science, Singapore alone scored above 14 US.
states.

Washington State children would rank in sixth place in the world
for science and 13th for math.
Within the U.S., the conservative American Legislative Exchange
Council ranked the Evergreen State number two behind Wisconsin for
K-12 education. You want world-class standards? Well, you have
them.

Oh, yes, let us not forget the July 2001 laudatory announcement
in College Board News. American high school students in
physics and calculus, who passed advanced-placement exams went on
to outperform students in the rest of the world. This showed
dramatically that our best are clearly "at the top of the world in
academic achievement," stated Lee Jones, executive director of the
College Board's Advanced Placement Program.

"Reform" as high-stakes testing

Most states have developed high-stakes tests that punish
children and schools if they do not meet some arbitrary standard or
the never-defined "educational accountability." Unacknowledged is
the evidence from 28 states with high-stakes tests-Washington
excluded-demonstrating that between 1993 and 2000 student learning
after testing was at the same level or at lower levels than it was
before the high-stakes policies were implemented. As researchers in
Colorado and Massachusetts report, student achievement actually
goes down when high-stakes tests are instituted, or randomly
fluctuates up and down yearly.

Poverty, minority status, and high-stakes tests

Researchers are virtually unanimous-internationally, nationally,
and in the state of Washington-that family poverty is a primary
determinant of student achievement. Childhood poverty predicts poor
achievement on high-stakes tests. Attributes of poverty that
negatively impact schooling outcomes are inadequate nutrition, a
single-parent family structure, and alienation.

Minority status of a child is a strong predictor of poor
performance on high-stakes tests, especially for English-language
learners. In most cases, minority status is coupled with poverty.
Applying the fairness doctrine-"do no child harm"-this is a strong
indictment of high-stakes tests. Policy makers are penalizing
children for conditions over which these youngsters have no
control, ignoring the real social problems.

The Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL)

The Washington state legislature mandated the WASL as a
high-stakes test in 1996. This test battery has been both praised
and criticized. The Washington Education Association contends that
the test is neither a valid nor a reliable assessment. The test
certainly has no predictive validity. Well, not entirely. As one
researcher reported, students who flunk the WASL at grade 4 have a
one-in-33 chance of passing it at grade 7. These results and four
years of such testing are interpreted as evidence that the WASL is
creating aversive educational consequences. Fourth-grade students
are apparently exhibiting characteristics of learned
helplessness, a specific consequence of psychological stress-in
this case, the stress of being given an impossible task. With flunk
rates ranging from 76 percent for minority children to an overall
rate of 50 percent for nearly all children, the WASL may indeed be
perceived as an impossible task. This perception creates aversive
test anxiety, the consequences of which become clear when one
analyzes the yearly WASL reports.

We assert that tests should have both formative and diagnostic
functions. Tests should provide explicit feedback to both students
and their teachers, so that a provision for correction may be
initiated or appropriate placement decisions made. The feedback
that is provided by the WASL does not inform students or teachers
on what specific essential learning in reading, mathematics,
writing, science, and listening has or has not been mastered, or
how they could reach mastery if they are "not meeting standard."
The WASL does not promote student achievement, since the teacher,
student, or parent does not have access to the actual test taken.
In fact, the testing company, NCS Pearson of New Jersey and London,
destroys each physical test booklet after it is computer-scanned.
There is no way a teacher can analyze student errors. Hence any
chance a teacher has to remediate student deficiencies is
negated.

Calculating the effect-size statistic, we found that there is no
overall effect on student achievement as a consequence of mandatory
WASL testing. Our analysis included WASL scores from 1998 to 2002.
Yearly comparisons reveal no effect. However, comparing 1998 to
2002, a small positive effect appears. We calculated the cost to
gain one-percentile improvement on the WASL exceeds $10,000,000 per
year.

For any test to have impact on instruction and learning it must
provide useful, relevant, immediate feedback to users. Further,
tests must be reliable and valid. The current genre of high-stakes
tests meets none of these criteria. We call on all education
policy-makers to question high-stakes tests, continued use of
arbitrary standards, and yearly achievement targets.

Don Orlich, a member of the College
of Education faculty at Washington State University from 1967 to
1996, serves as professor emeritus in the College of Sciences,
Science Mathematics Engineering Education Center. His specialty is
in curriculum and instruction, with emphasis on science education.
He is co-author of Teaching Strategies: A Guide to Effective
Instruction, 7th edition, Houghton Mifflin, 2004 (his 18th
book).

Gifford, a doctoral candidate in
Educational Leadership and Counseling Psychology at WSU,
specializes in counseling psychology and test construction and
analysis.